


Ten Fingers and Toes

by fardareismai



Series: Make The World Better Promo [7]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Familial Relationships, Gen, and i'll fight anyone who says different, mcgonagall is harry's mom, or aunt, prompt fulfilled
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 18:48:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9780380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fardareismai/pseuds/fardareismai
Summary: She's known him since before he was born, really, and been forced to watch him grow up in the most difficult way a child can.  Minerva McGonagall is not an affectionate or demonstrative woman, but she loves Harry Potter like the child she's never had.A Harry Potter prompt for my Make The World Better Promo.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Jade-Bangle over on Tumblr donated toiletries and toys to her local women's shelter, so because she is so generous and wonderful, I wrote her the following prompt:
> 
> Minerva & Harry, all the moments the books left out (aka McGonagall is such a wonderful role model/secret mother hen).

The cat glared into the empty space from which the old man had vanished, the clever witch’s brain working behind those luminous eyes. 

“Better that he grow up away from all that,” Dumbledore had said.  “Better by far.”

_Better for who?_ McGonagall wondered. 

The cat padded up to the bundle of blankets on the doorstep and looked at it for a long moment.  The child was small, with two arms, two legs, and ten fingers and toes, just as a child should be.  He was not extraordinary, save for the scar across his forehead.  She then laid down against the child’s back, providing both warmth and support as the woman thought.

She could not help but worry about what kind of child the people in the big, square house behind the privet hedges would raise.  The child of James and Lily Potter would have been clever and compassionate, with an innate sense of fun, a disregard for the rules, and the courage of a lion.  Minerva wondered, as the baby breathed against her and she purred soothingly, how much of that was inborn, and how much would have come from his parents’ careful rearing.

She had watched the family all day.  For a witch she had few prejudices about muggles in general.  She knew, as so few of her kind seemed to, that magic did not give a person the keys to intellect, creativity, or goodness, and that a lack of it did not make a person simple, dull, or base.

If anything, in her considerable experience, it was quite the opposite.  Muggles, without the crutch of magic, had progressed the world forward as wizards had not.  They had touched the stars and plumbed the depths of the oceans.  They had fed the hungry and healed the sick.  They had made impossible alliances, and they had broken the world.

In truth, Minerva McGonagall had a great deal of respect for the power of muggle imagination, and it was imagination which could make a great wizard.

The trouble was that the people in the house at which Dumbledore had left Lily’s son appeared to be at a complete loss for imagination, seeming only interested in those things no farther than the ends of their own noses.

As the dawn light licked the edges of the world and Minerva knew her time with the baby had come to an end, she comforted herself with the notion that true cruelty is a product of imagination as well as true inspiration.  The child could live without the latter, but he would also not be forced to endure the former, she told herself as she vanished into the hedges to watch the child’s aunt bring him inside.

She wished him well, sending up a prayer she’d been taught as a child to gods she did not believe in that he would be well, and that she would see him in a few years’ time.

~?~?~?~?~

“He’s starved, Dumbledore.  He’s small for his age and he’s obviously hungry.  You said you were watching them!”

“And so I have been.  Had he been in mortal danger, they would have been stopped

“Mortal danger?” she shrieked, sounding like a bird of prey descending on some poor mouse, in spite of the great respect and love she held for the man seated before her.  “That was your threshold, Albus?  Not mistreatment?  Not neglect?  They had to nearly kill him before you would have stepped in?”

It was guilt that made her speak so to him.  James and Sirius had trusted Dumbledore with everything, but Lily and Remus had come to _her_ in those early days, had asked her to lead them into the fight.  Minerva had deferred to Albus- it was he who had the makings of a general in the war against darkness, he who had fought before, and he who was the greatest magician of the age.

But to see Lily’s son having endured the cruelty that she had convinced herself that he would not, she wished that she had allowed the headmaster less reign in such affairs.  He had entered the Great Hall and she had known him immediately.  He looked like his father, but too thin- two arms spindly, ten fingers thin as spider legs.

“He is with his aunt and uncle for a reason.”

It infuriated her when he used that terribly reasonable tone.  It was a tone that said, by its mere timbre and inflection that he was Dumbledore, and hadn’t she always trusted him for a reason?

_No_ , she decided.  It wouldn’t work this time.

“ _Reason_ ,” she spat.  “There’s no _reason_ to leave a child with people who mistreat him.  There are hundreds of wizarding families who would take him in.  Even the Muggle protection agencies would have better served him.”

“He is with his aunt to preserve his _life_.”

Minerva drew up short at this.  Her eyes narrowed at the old man behind the desk, not sure whether she believed this statement.  He was not above lying to manipulate his case.

“And what is it you think threatens him then?” she asked.

He blinked those cold blue eyes and rested the tips of his fingers together in front of his mouth, staring at her for a very long moment.

“Lord Voldemort is not dead,” he said softly.

Minerva jumped at the name- she had though never to hear it again- and the very idea of Dumbledore’s words made her break out in a cold sweat.

“He is not dead,” Dumbledore continued, “and he will return.  When he does, Harry Potter is best protected in the home of his aunt, when he cannot be at Hogwarts.”

“Muggles can protect him from… You-Know-Who better than wizards?” she asked, still not ready to believe him.

He did not smile.  “You must trust me, Minerva.”

_“If we cannot trust Dumbledore, we cannot trust anyone.”_

She had said that to Lily and Remus all those years ago when she had entrusted their safety and her own to the headmaster of Hogwarts.  She still believed it, more or less, though the sight of the Potter’s son looking hungry and wan made her want to tell Dumbledore precisely where he could store his trust and her job, take the boy- the one who looked so like his father, but without his father’s easy smile, or his mother’s confident grace- and run.

“If you say so, Albus,” she said instead.

~?~?~?~?~

She watched him carefully for seven years, from the first day he entered the Great Hall (and every year on that first night she ran her eyes over him more carefully than was, perhaps, perfectly professional, checking like a mother that he had all his limbs, all his digits- that he was whole and unharmed) to the day he boarded the train back to the world where she couldn’t protect him.

She pushed him into Quidditch, remembering the sound of James’ laughter when he flew.  She challenged him in classes, remembering Lily’s quick wit and James’ talent.  She stood- more times than the boy could possibly know- between him and Snape’s childish revenge.

Her heart stopped the night that Albus told her that the Potter boy had gone into the Chamber of Secrets after the Weasley girl.

The year that Remus returned to the school, she apologized to him for not protecting them- Lily, Sirius, James, Peter, and most of all Harry- as he had asked.  He told her that when Harry Potter got close to the dementors, he heard Lily dying.  She’d cried herself to sleep that night, and woken determined not to fail him again.

She bit her nails to the quick for every one of the games in the Tri-Wizard tournament, and when Delores Umbridge began a vendetta against the school as a whole and Harry Potter in particular, Minerva stood as a shield between them.

When Dumbledore died, McGonagall rose like a phoenix to take his place- to protect, to serve, and to stand between Hogwarts and the forces that would bring it down.  Even as she failed, she stood, fighting the losing fight on behalf of the forces of the light.

Then, when Harry Potter- the careless, selfish, foolish, brave child- returned, she fought for him, and pretended she hadn’t been doing so since the beginning.

And when he died- when his body lay broken and beaten, all the life, the joy, the brilliant, burning potential that he had represented in her mind for so many years finally snuffed out- she shrieked.  She had finally and completely failed Lily and Remus and James and Sirius and Albus and, most egregiously, Harry.  And though the fight went on, though she knew she must push forward with all her strength to keep the darkness at bay, some small part of her heart was no longer in it.  Some part of her would never be in the fight again.

And when he lived, when he stood before them (her eyes drew down him once again, like a mother, counting his limbs and digits to be sure he was whole and healthy) she knew what a phoenix must, to rise from the ashes and live again.

~?~?~?~?~

She looked at the bundle held out to her, black hair, red face, and so very, terribly, wonderfully familiar.

“We’re calling him James,” Ginevera was saying from across the room as she looked down at the child.  “James Sirius.”

“Might as well call him Fred George!” Hagrid boomed.

Minerva looked up from the tiny face into the one had once looked so much like the child in his arms.  He still had two arms and two legs, and ten fingers and toes.  He didn’t need her to count anymore, but she always would.

She sniffed.  “He’ll spend his entire Hogwarts career in detention.”

Harry grinned.  “Detention just means you’re looking out for him.”


End file.
